Open The Sky For Me
by HopefulVoice
Summary: The sky is a familiar one today, Liz thinks, the bleached white expanse of it identical to those days spent in late October back in Nebraska.


The sky is a familiar one today, Liz thinks, the bleached white expanse of it identical to those days spent in late October back in Nebraska. The chill in the air combined with the color strips her down and makes her feel raw, exposed nerve endings seeming to prick all over her flesh. Once she sorts through all the metaphorical stinging that results in she finds herself terribly nostalgic under it all. The call of Nebraska has quieted over the years spent away but only in the way that an out of tune radio turns to static. One quick jolt to the aerial and it comes back with sudden clarity, ringing in her ears and getting stuck in her head for weeks on end.

Red finds her sat outside, perched twenty odd yards away on a wall. The measured noise of his shoes is what alerts her to his presence, her eyes angled downwards. She'd learned to recognize his footsteps within forty eight hours of meeting him. She'd know him anywhere and instantly by now. Red settles down next to her, several carefully chosen inches between them, his own eyes trained straight ahead at the singularly uninteresting road. He didn't come out to look or to not look at things; he came out to talk and doesn't care what he's seeing. Liz glances up at him briefly and then returns her gaze to the ground, going for 'thoughtful' rather than 'surly', though she doubts she's succeeding very well.

With him there, Nebraska seems further away that before. With him sat those few inches away from her she finds herself being inexorably grounded. Elizabeth Keen is a resident of Maryland now, of a state that is somehow just a shade too close to Nebraska, too alike in enough small ways that she can never stop grabbing for the home she understands is lost to her. She feels herself bleaching out to match the sky as she draws back down into herself and looks up at it again.

"Something on your mind?" he asks at last, apparently made bolder by her movement. Liz hums tunelessly under her breath and cocks her head to one side.

"Just thinking," she says finally, tapping a finger to her temple with a tight approximation of a smile. She sees him rolling his eyes out of the corner of her own, so used to her avoidance that he doesn't even bother to comment.

"Wouldn't you rather do it inside? The weather's terrible," Red says, though he can't be cold because he's wearing four layers and a scarf, elegant where the one she didn't snatch up before leaving is not and besides, Red doesn't tend to mind the chill much. "Is it about the last case?" he continues when she doesn't respond, a blunt statement more than a question. Good old Red, she thinks, though she'd never say it aloud- he knows her better than she'd ever expected, knows that care is something that she leaves to other people. There's no need to talk around what he means. Saves them both the trouble of navigating a conversation she isn't equipped for, full of small talk and euphemism. The case he means had been messy, and for a moment a splash of red intrudes on the white in her mind. She can see why he might draw that conclusion.

"No," Liz answers, and then: "Nebraska, actually." She wants to see how he'll respond. Liz always wants to know how Red will respond to things, she supposes, pushes and prods him beyond even what she thinks is acceptable. Something of her is caught in him, skin pulled taut by barbed wire, and it feels like an itch at the base of her skull when she is with him. That itch is something she can't live with or without. She'd never compare it to an addiction, but it's still something terrifying and unholy and only avoidable in theory, rarely in practice. It isn't, she muses, even that she really 'likes' him, though the thought occurs that such an event isn't far off at all. No, it's only that he interests her at the moment, an altogether more dangerous proposition. Friends can drift away, be relegated to the address book and sent a Christmas card once a year. Obsession tends not to be so forgiving.

"Good memories or bad?" he asks, turning to her, expression unreadable. She swears his face is cut from marble sometimes, and his eyes are shuttered. She likes that he can wonder about her good memories. Even Liz doesn't always manage that, and she's the one with said good memories to start with.

"Not really," she says. The sky is white, her skin and bones feel too hot and heavy. Raymond Reddington is sat several inches to her left and she doesn't know that she feels much at all, good or bad. She knows the memories are there. Her mind doesn't seem ready to think about the details yet. Red's eyes stay shuttered as he lets the comment pass without remark or contradiction. That might be understanding, or it might be exasperation. The problem will occupy her for a good half an hour tonight.

Liz adds one to the mental tally labelled 'points owed to Red' and lets the silence continue, filled with memories of dead things and a place she wishes she could bury alongside them, her undertaker sat beside her to lead the way.


End file.
